Maps of the Imagination

The Writer as Cartographer

Turchi posits the idea that maps help people understand where they are in the world in the same way that literature, whether realistic or experimental, attempts to explain human realities

Maps of the Imagination takes us on a magic carpet ride over terrain both familiar and exotic. Using the map as a metaphor, fiction writer Peter Turchi considers writing as a combination of exploration and presentation, all the while serving as an erudite and charming guide. He compares the way a writer leads a reader though the imaginary world of a story, novel, or poem to the way a mapmaker charts the physical world. “To ask for a map,” writes Turchi, “is to say, ‘Tell me a story.’ ”

With intelligence and wit, the author looks at how mapmakers and writers deal with blank space and the blank page; the conventions they use (both the ones readers recognize and those that often go unnoticed) or consciously disregard; the role of geometry in maps and the parallel role of form in writing; how maps and writing serve to re-create an individual’s view of the world; and the artist’s delicate balance of intuition with intention. The ancient Greeks, German globe makers, and British cartographers join forces with the Marx Brothers, NASA, and Roadrunner cartoons to shed light on the strategies of writers as diverse as Sappho, Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, Vladimir Nabokov, Italo Calvino, Don DeLillo, and Heather McHugh.

A unique combination of history, critical cartography, personal essay, and practical guide to writing, Maps of the Imagination is a book for writers, for readers, and for anyone interested in creativity. Colorful illustrations and Turchi’s insightful observations make his book both beautiful and a joy to read.

Accolades

Designated as a New York Times 100 Best Nonfiction Books of All Time

Winner of the Book Art Foundation of Germany Stiftung Buchkunst Silver Medal

Winner of the Texas Institute of Letters Fred Whitehead Award for Best Design

Winner of the Bookbuilders West Book Show Certificate of Excellence

Designated as a Choice Magazine Outstanding Academic Book

Designated as a bostonist.com (Boston) Best Book

Designated as a Communication Arts Magazine Design Annual Featured Book

Designated as an AIGA 50 Books/50 Covers Featured Book

Designated as a Print Magazine Regional Design Featured Book

Designated as a Santa Fe New Mexican Bestseller

Praise

“Readers, after all, love to get lost in a good book. It is a wise writer who will not only deposit them there but lead them out again, whole and thoroughly satisfied.”
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— ForeWord

“It’s not uncommon to compare the writing of a story to the mapping of a world, but no one has so fully, or so seductively and rewardingly, performed as extended a meditation on this illuminating metaphor as Turchi. . . . Brilliant and pleasurable, Turchi’s musing on our innate need to know where we are, where we might go, and why alters our perceptions of not only maps and fiction but also the nature of the mind’s terra incognita.”

— Booklist

“For Turchi, the map is more than metaphor: it is an organizing principle of narrative. Language is like a land, paragraphs are districts, sentences are streets, and words are only lines and curves constructed the way maps are made of lines and shapes. Letters are like wild canyons and chaotic seas that the writer maps into words and then into sentences and then into scenes.”
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— The New Yorker

“I wish I had written Maps of the Imagination.”

— Rebecca Solnit

“A gorgeous book in every way… engaging, intelligent, and never jargon laden; this book wears its vast learning lightly.”

— CHOICE

“A book that cries to be read more than once.”

— Greensboro News & Record

“Maps of the Imagination ranges widely across a many disciplines and art forms, from mathematics and formal geometry to Marx Brothers movies and the works of such writers as Borges and Calvino. Sometimes with off-the-cuff analogies, sometimes with pages of analysis, Turchi charts a lively course through a labyrinthine field of varying ways of looking at the world and, most important, the blank page.”

— Publishers Weekly

“[Turchi’s] study of maps has inspired writers, artists, and designers for more than a decade, about what maps can teach us when it comes to the creative process.”
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— Fast Company

“A treasure map for discovering secrets of the writer's life.”

— The Charlotte Observer

“Maps of the Imagination should inspire both reader and writer as well as those of us who look at a map and immediately begin to dream of journeys not yet taken.”

— The St. Petersburg Times

“A genre-defying gem that straddles art book, writer’s manual and cultural critique in an utterly captivating way that makes you look at both old maps and familiar fiction with new eyes.”
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Called "one of the country's foremost thinkers on the art of writing" by the Houston Chronicle,Peter Turchi's books include A Muse and a Maze: Writing as Puzzle, Mystery, and Magic, Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer; Suburban Journals: The Sketchbooks, Drawings, and Prints of Charles Ritchie, in collaboration with the artist; a novel, The Girls Next Door; and a collection of stories, Magician. Turchi's short story "Night, Truck, Two Lights Burning," listed as one of 100...